As the volume of content available on the Internet exponentially expands, the role of search engines in allowing users to quickly and efficiently locate relevant data has become ever more necessary. Early, and to some extent, present-day search engines receive user queries, query an index of content items and provide a ranked list of results for the given query. Generally, a given item in the ranked list comprises a link title corresponding to the HTML <title> tag of the search result and a snippet of text present within the page (also referred to as a page abstract).
This methodology provides a quick, easy and efficient way to present relevant results for a given search query. This method, however, ignores the structured nature of the Internet and provides users with the bare minimum in response to a query. Subsequent solutions have involved providing search results templates to add additional detail for a given search result. For example, a user query for a film title may result in a search result having a link, as previously described, as well as a plurality of links contained within the main result that relate to the film (e.g., showtimes, synopsis, etc.). This approach provides the user with substantially more detail and allows the user to access these pages without navigating away from the search results page, but is a somewhat “hard-coded” solution, which tends to be inflexible.
These systems and methods fail to capitalize on the semantic nature of web technologies such as Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), Resource Description Framework (RDF), Embedded Resource Description Framework (eRDF), Resource Description Framework-In-Attributes (RDFa) and microformats. Additionally, a templating scheme, as described, may be functional in one domain but may be unusable in a disparate domain. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method for creating generic snippets of search results based on extracting metadata from the search result page itself and presenting this snippet to a user on a search results page.